(Reuters) - Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL.O) is laying off employees from its global recruiting team as the tech giant continues to slow hiring, it said on Wednesday.

The company's decision to let go of a few hundred employees is not part of a wide-scale layoff and will retain a significant majority of the team for hiring critical roles. It will also help the workers search for roles within the company and elsewhere.

Alphabet is the first "Big Tech" company to lay off employees this quarter, after peers like Meta (META.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Amazon (AMZN.O) downsized aggressively earlier in 2023 as a weak economy put an end to their pandemic-led hiring sprees.

California-based Alphabet cut about 12,000 jobs in January, reducing its workforce by 6%.

Layoffs in the U.S. rose more than threefold in August from July and nearly fourfold compared with a year ago, according to a report by employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast that new claims for state unemployment benefits would rise by about 8% in the week ended Sept. 9, after having fallen 13,000 to 216,000 in the prior seven-day period.